Dear Member, 

Below the latest update from INMO:

Emergency meeting of Executive Council

Your Executive Council met in emergency session today to discuss the inadequacy of the response by the HSE to the current out and out crisis you are working through in overcrowded emergency departments, overcrowded corridors and wards.

Despite constant warnings from INMO and members on the frontline, your employer has left the crisis to develop to an impossible point before dealing with it. There has been totally inadequate planning when it comes to capacity and workforce building.

Your Executive Council have sanctioned the beginning of consultation with you and your colleagues on a campaign of industrial action in pursuance of safe staffing levels that are underpinned with legislation and clinical facilitation in all hospitals to ensure a safe skills mix.

We want to assure members once again that the Executive Council will not accept the constant ask on nurses and midwives to crisis manage the failed planning by government and the HSE.  We know that levels of burnout are at an all-time high. We must now take whatever action is deemed necessary to ensure that we do not endure this level of danger in our workplaces in the coming months and years ahead. We will now commence a series of information and consultation meetings with members over the next month. We will notify you of the locations and times of these meeting separately.  

Simply put this is not acceptable and we cannot continue to tolerate this level of inhumane treatment of our patients and unhealthy and unsafe working conditions for members.  

Submitting Statements of Concern

It is important that members know they are not responsible for the environments in which they are forced to try and deliver safe care. Nurses will of course be supported by INMO officials in raising concerns about substandard care.

We have ben highlighting in the public domain the escalating concerns of members regarding the quality of care being provided as required by the NMBI Code of Professional Conduct you are entitled as patient advocates to raise these concerns.  

The INMO’s Statement of Concern allows nurses to inform management that in any nurse’s professional clinical opinion that the safety of patients in their care and their own ability to practice to the required standard is being compromised due to incidents of overcrowding or short staffing.

You are not responsible for systems risks over which you have no control – it is simply impossible to provide safe care in these increasingly unsafe environments.  Nationally, we raise this through our daily trolley count and with the HSE. Furthermore,  we have written confirmation from the HSE that nurses will not and cannot be held accountable for system risks over which they have no control. Ref : WRC 2016 ED agreement

Staff are encouraged to report incidents, adverse events and near misses. https://www.inmo.ie/Statement_of_Concern 

The INMO executive council will not be silenced when it comes to calling out unsafe working practices. We stand with patients and their relatives, and we will not accept this inhumane treatment. While many will try to laud the fact that we have seen a decrease of patients on trolleys from 931 to 535, we won’t be part of attempts to justify this as an improvement. Nurses and midwives expect and deserve to work in a safe practice environment in which they can deliver the safe and excellent care they are trained to deliver.

Please come to the meetings and be part of the fightback.

Le gach dea-ghuí,

Phil Ní Sheaghdha,
INMO General Secretary